Monday, June 3, 2013

TechEd North America 2013 Kicks Off Announcing Heaps of New MSFT Releases

Microsoft's flagship conference - TechEd 2013 - is kicking off today (June 3rd) in New Orleans. The Day 1 keynote speech by Microsoft's Brad Anderson is of particular interest due to the media storm that has been generated around the so-called Windows 'Blue' wave of updates across their client and server stack.

Here's a high-level summary of the keynote and announcements that have been made:

Windows 8.1

Microsoft announced the newest release of their client Operating System - called Windows 8.1. This release will be made available as a free upgrade to existing Windows 8 customers. The preview bits will be made available on June 26th and the final release will hit the shelves before the year is out.

The following Windows 8.1 features have been demonstrated or mentioned during the keynote:

Enhanced tile customization

Group policy management of the Start Screen

A new feature for Windows 8.1 and PowerPoint called Mirrorcast allows Windows 8.1 devices to easily pair with compatible streamless devices to allow seamless wireless presenting.

Workplace Join is a new feature that allows you to easily connect your non-domain joined device to the workplace and to just as easily remove all the customization and management of that device once you're finished working for the day.

Apps can be managed from the cloud with Windows Intune.

Windows Server 2012 R2

As the name suggests, Windows Server 2012 now has an updated release too. Here's what's been announced for it:

Work Folders is a new feature that should most likely see usage of applications such as Dropbox getting less and less use in the enterprise.

Active Directory on-premise now works with Azure Active Directory.

Storage spaces are taken to the next level with enhanced performance and scalability. With Storage Tiering, you'll get approx. a 16x improvement on Windows Server 2012 RTM.

Inbox VPN gateway for Network Virtualization

Hyper-V

Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V has a number of significant enhancements, some of which are:

(Update - some of the info below has been added as features get mentioned in the breakout sessions)

Using DeDup storage with virtual machines can now enhance the performance of the virtual machines by intelligently caching the storage.

Live Migration compression now means that your virtual machines will migrate between hosts far quicker than with Windows Server 2012 RTM.

Using RDMA with Live Migration will enhance the live migration of your VM's even quicker than with the compression option.

Hyper-V replica can be managed across sites and with greater scale using the Hyper-V Recovery Manager feature of Windows Azure.

Remote Access via VMBus - this is seriously cool. It basically means we now get similar functionality to the HP ILO or Dell DRAC features with our virtual machines in Hyper-V.

Like Windows Server, System Center 2012 now gets an 'R2' release. The only mention in the keynote of System Center was around Intune integrating with on-premise ConfigMgr to manage Windows 8.1 apps but this integration is nothing new. Hopefully as the week goes on, we'll get some additional feature updates on what's new.

(Update - some of the info below has been added as features get mentioned in the breakout sessions)

Built-in service template for Windows Server 2012 R2 Gateway functionality as part of SCVMM 2012 R2.

Preferred Product

Translate This Page

Speaking at Experts Live

Speaking at Cloud Camp

Speaking at CDC 2018

Total Pageviews

Subscribe To My Blog

LinkedIn

Twitter

My Books

About Me

I'm a Microsoft MVP in the Cloud and Datacenter Management space and work as a consultant for Ergo based in Dublin, Ireland.

I really enjoy the fact that we are in a constantly evolving industry that requires us to up-skill as much as we can and one that provides us with new products and solutions each year to make the job all the more interesting and ever changing!